View source for Research:MDem/4.4r/4064 democulture

= problems with democulture =

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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">democulture:
the model that, separate from the concepts or processes of behavior, laws, economic structure, or other such formal social constructions which exist above individuals and such organic formations as families and friendships,
_culture itself_ is subject to a process of broad masses of people determining in an official way what it should and shouldn't be. that when Spanishness is corrupt, a bunch of people can band together and specifically take over _Spanishness_ — not Spain, not a province of Spain, not a government office in Spain, not even a church building in Spain or a factory building in Spain, but really specifically the core existence of Spanishness in the world at all before anyone forms Spain or any of the structures inside of the formal borders of Spain.

why people would think there is evidence to believe in the existence or possibility of democulture:

<nowiki>*</nowiki> NLRB regulating the individual behavior of business territory owners to allow or disallow forming unions without dethroning the owners. prohibiting unions can be considered a kind of local culture that Liberal democracy appears to have regulated.

<nowiki>*</nowiki> anti-discrimination laws - large structures in the United States can prohibit blatantly firing people because the boss got tired of Black people or gay people. hiring or firing particular demographic identities of people can be considered a kind of local culture that Liberal democracy superficially appears to have regulated.

<nowiki>*</nowiki> religion - although many bigoted churches exist, any number of inclusive churches also exist. this has caused people to, for some unclear reason that nobody has ever explained well, decide that inclusive churches can be engineered simply by prohibiting specific forms of bigotry hard enough. it is hypothesized that churches actually care about what people outside them think of them as much as in reality it could be that they do not, and that independently of what national laws are and how government operates, surrounding a church with enough shame and peer pressure will cause it to stop behaving according to what it thinks the creator and owner of the entire universe wants it to do and has been personally telling it to do. anybody should be able to see this is a dubious hypothesis, because if you can simply fantastically imagine having the creator of the whole universe on your side, that creator should logically possess the power to utterly obliterate anyone and anything else for behaving incorrectly, creating a rational incentive for somebody who believes in a creator to push away any groups they consider the enemy of God and reject change. this overall dynamic around religion seems to come from the notion that freedom of religion is fundamental to human existence rather than being specifically a thing carved away from the capacities of government. however, such a statement creates a contradiction. if people are always inherently allowed to believe a particular religion in autonomy from the surrounding population who believe other religions, but a religion is composed of cultural statements and practices, how can it ever be justified to bring down democulture on a religion and attempt to demand arbitrary change to that religion? however, if it were literally inevitable that people would always be Christian as almost a matter of ethnicity, to the point being Christian was the same category of things as being a member of the population of California, there would be an argument that it is fully in line with democratic principles that when a particular purported office of God is demanding that its followers be bigoted somebody must dethrone and re-fill the tyrannical office of bigoted God. there are still problems here when we realize that this model of "democracy" inherently gives the United States the right to forcibly remove Third-World countries' governments on grounds of bringing down democulture on corrupt political Cultures, thus replacing "mean" Cultures with "nice" Cultures on a global scale.  [*g]

<nowiki>*</nowiki> language - language, unfortunately, always possesses something of an inherent process of hegemony politics. every word or phrase in a language always means something precisely because people associate a series of sounds to mean something, but at the same time, which of those meanings will be the "official" one can only happen in a political battle over what people demand to be the official meaning or accept to be the official meaning. imagine the consequences for somebody merely trying to use a word to communicate if five million people believe the words _sex_ and _gender_ exclude transgender people while ten do not versus the consequences if ten people believe _sex_ and _gender_ exclude transgender people while five million do not. the word _gender_ takes on a slotted character where the way a word is received by other people in daily life is actually decided on by a previous hegemony politics struggle over the terrain of a given word, where after that struggle is complete a word appears to have "always" linked through a signifier equation to a particular ontology, but in reality every word links to an on-the-ground battle of free-floating social graphs taking place between two or more Social-Philosophical Systems containing internal ontologies of how they operate to claim a societal slot in order to make their own local internal ontology the only official structure and the only official ontology. the otherwise-terribly-complex concept of "culture" can in some cases be reduced down to Social-Philosophical-Material Systems of human beings physically arranged into certain graph shapes instead of other graph shapes inside which language forms itself into a particular ontology of defined concepts connected to other defined concepts outwardly represented as words connected to other words. given this particular situational model of what culture is, there is an argument that any act of education which brings people's mental ontologies of reality closer to reality is a small act of effecting democulture. people having bad ontologies of reality which for instance do not comprehend the existence of physically-present transgender people can be considered a form of local culture that governing bodies, perhaps including popular dictionaries or government institutions that for whatever reason have policies against discriminatory uses of language, appear to have regulated.

<nowiki>*</nowiki> Rhizome - Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalyst model of Rhizome would appear to be an attempt at a mathematical model of democulture. if you read _Anti-Oedipus_, you would notice that its initial definition of schizoanalysis versus psychoanalysis seems to be attempting to characterize most forms of oppression or dehumanization as forms of local culture, and attempting to characterize the whole effort of having movements around disability and mental illness as a matter of casting off or destroying culture — really, in this introduction, it almost begins to outright sound as if schizoanalysis is arguing for the abolition of the entire existence of culture period. after that, if you continue to the schizoanalyst models of Rhizome and "plateaus", these models would seem to be arguing that human beings form into movements purely because specific issues magnetically pull them together by breaking down the barriers between individual minds and transforming people into a kind of uncountable non-individual slime mold of people, and this non-individual slime mold of people is inherently drawn to the task of oozing into any area of compatible people it has not yet picked up and subsequently crushing any formations of anomalous culture that threaten it collectively; Deleuze and Guattari's Rhizome model would seem to model democulture as a kind of pseudo- living organism that becomes hatched or birthed at the site of individual existence as some given mode of being is limited by other things around it, which strives to live, grow, and horizontally regenerate simply because it is alive. if one could ever conclusively show that the model of Rhizome described the only reason or primary reason people form into all movements, it would be trivial to then argue that even Social-Philosophical-Material Systems of Bolshevism and Marxist party-nations actually form themselves _through processes of Rhizome_, given that repeated forms of oppression are the fundamental basis of all movements and factory workers being magnetically drawn into soviet structures to form a new society is just another form of shared forms of oppression breaking down the barriers between individuals to create a greater non-individual. the work of Deleuze and Guattari has done a lot to build up an outwardly-apparent case that class dynamics really explain nothing about the development of societies at all and can hardly hope to model any process of creating a better society compared to the sheer "natural", organism-like process of democulture.

<nowiki>*</nowiki> Maoism - in early Maoist movements, Maoists organized together large groups of peasants from peripheral villages to directly attack and take over cities. by the definition of countable Cultures being separated by socially-connected groups of people and thus forming Social-Graph Systems, the isolated population of capitalists in the city could be considered a countable Culture and the population of peasants could be considered another countable Culture. one area of local culture rose up against another area of local culture in order to secure its human rights, and ultimately produced a central party-nation to regulate the relationship between localized countable Cultures — if not precisely all of them that existed within China, then at least some of them. the previous mistreatment of peasants by city people can be considered a rogue local culture that the early Communist Party of China regulated.

<nowiki>*</nowiki> Gramscianism - hegemony politics stated in a mathematical definition and why it can be considered democulture

<nowiki>*</nowiki> graph economics - years from this moment, the smartest Liberal on earth might read one of the finished [[Philosophical_Research:Molecular_Democracy/5.1r/2081 market-signals|chapters]] about graph economics and their direct relationship to ideologies, and say, oh, but if you've invented a form of democracy that deals in graph arrangements rather than ideas, well we've clearly been doing the same thing all along and you have clearly just invented a more sophisticated form of democulture. any arrangement of people into any ideology can be considered local culture, so any kind of molecular democracy or graph economics that might administer those arrangements would then appear to be a system of democulture that has regulated chaotic relations between areas of culture by bring Cultures to a discussion table in order to create a government of the Cultures by the Cultures.
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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">[*g]  being in a "personal relationship with God" is pretty comparable to being friends with a top-tier _Dragon Ball_ character. when people believe in religion, it's basically like a person in the universe of _Dragon Ball_ deciding that they don't have to worry about some particular calamity because Goku or Piccolo etc will protect them. if you pray to God, it is supposed that God can rewrite reality through answer prayers and miracles. if you pray to Goku, it is a stated fact that Goku can collect the Dragon Balls and rewrite reality through summoning Shenlong and wishing for everybody to come back to life.
what happens when you pray to God? essentially Dragon Ball happens. whatever you were hoping was going to happen actually happens through the total population of people around you assembling into an appropriate arrangement to make it happen, perhaps by nominating some sort of designated figurehead or champion that fights off another one but then due to their power or position gets to tell everybody what to do.
said another way? religion is just politics with more steps.
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<h3 style="margin: 0 0 0.9em 0; padding-top: 0;" data-datetime="2025-03-02T13:07:05Z">3-02</h3>
<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">it is so weird how
people seem to think the most consistently true thing about all countable Cultures is that they are whatever people Freely Will them to be
when what seems actually true from observing reality is that the most consistently true thing about countable Cultures is that they _cannot be controlled from the outside_. this seems to be what successful Marxist movements "with country characteristics" have taught us — people can live in North Korea and all be relatively content despite everyone having really backward views of society as you'd have in a country that just barely made it out of the development stage of free-floating tribes, feudal orders, or monarchy. you wouldn't think that's the way it works. you wouldn't think that people would be happy in countries if you couldn't plop down some arbitrary individual from another country and have them be happy there. but it really seems to be that countries function differently from individuals, wanting or not wanting particular things as populations. as a country develops it passes mysterious thresholds where suddenly issues that weren't important to people become important, where for instance suddenly gay and transgender people want rights.
it's really strange when you look at it from a bird's eye view. a lot of Existentialist theories have put together these models that sound like people have been transgender since thousands of years ago, not just in a general sense that centuries before now people have not been precisely cisgender but in the specific sense that Alice from today would have the exact same concept of being a transgender woman if she was born 3000 years ago and Bob from 3000 years ago would have exactly the same concept of being a transgender man that we have today. this doesn't seem to be the way it actually works when you observe concepts of gender between separate and independent countable Cultures. free-floating tribal populations in North America had a general not-exactly-labeled phenomenon of people who are not entirely male or female which has recently been named "two-spirit". the significance of this category is that people did not immediately invent a hard categorization of "people who look male but are female" or vice versa. sociologists in China report on a phenomenon where people tend to categorize lesbians and trans men into the same category called "T". again people did not invent the same categories of exactly how people are said to not fit into majority demographic identities.
it is really popular across the United States to think that whatever progressive movements we have in the United States are exactly the one that would happen in another country when actually what really happens might be shuffled around and not look exactly the same. the model of democulture fails to realize how arbitrary culture can truly be from population to population, and how if you always consider progressive or reactionary views a matter of culture the entire framing and language around changing culture could be so different you don't recognize it.
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<h3 style="margin: 0 0 0.9em 0; padding-top: 0;" data-datetime="2025-03-01T03:50:32Z">"otangelo"</h3>
<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">otangelo's war campaign -

in [https://www.reddit.com/r/AtheistExperience/comments/y10so6/what_was_the_truth_wanted_thing_about/ October 2022], doggedly persistent Christian apologist Otangelo snuck into the secular call-in show Truth Wanted
he had previously been banned for dishonest forms of argument, but it proved to not really be possible to make sure he couldn't get in again. this show, as well as others in the same orbit, had an array of rotating hosts who tended not necessarily to remember what happened with other hosts, and simultaneously, Otangelo was known to use significant numbers of sock-puppet accounts and caller aliases. Otangelo was going to improperly get back in eventually. and out of all the times he had done this, this time he made the decision he was really going to make it count. as soon as he got in, he proceeded to spitefully release information about a transgender host in service of empowering the anti-transgender ideological subpopulation against the much smaller transgender subpopulation.
at this point, further details about the situation become irrelevant, because the shape of Otangelo's attack and the general repeated occurrence of this population dynamic across the United States begin to blend together.

no matter what gender or sex you are and what religion you may or may not believe, you need to realize that if five thousand people suddenly found out exactly where you were, it would probably not be difficult to get rid of you.

yet, the attempt to characterize this problem as a matter of "privacy" is incorrect and useless.
imagine if five thousand people hated you and started a treasure hunt for your head, but the government had no idea where you were. there is no way a police officer could show up in time if the national government did not first violate your privacy by assigning you a street address. mailboxes are a violation of privacy. trash collection is a violation of privacy. the loss of privacy is not even a social contract, it is something that immediately occurs the moment we interact with another part of the world and cease to be cut off from it. in all the universe, only a black hole has complete privacy, because we literally cannot tell what is in it without leaving the entire normal functioning of light, matter, and time for a strange new form of physics that would probably destroy us. outside a black hole, there are only increasing levels of privacy violations. worse yet, the more that one's interactions with the world involve human beings, the more it becomes _impossible to control_ privacy violations. no matter what we would personally like human beings to do, there is always the chance they will decide to be awful people and simultaneously refuse to obey particular standards of morality. the entire concept of privacy is actually something of an existential nightmare. believe that privacy inherently exists, and you are merely awaiting the day you learn about the coming arrival of Non-Existent-Privacy Cthulhu.

things get _slightly_ less terrifying if instead of spending our effort trying to define privacy we realize that the primary reason "privacy violations" actually become dangerous is that when one population has enough people to throw at another population and they are all independent agents in every other respect than this connection, the target population has no real control over what they do beyond fighting or running away. the sheer separation of two populations into free agents becomes in and of itself a form of power. and this is _not_ an inherently good thing.
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<h3 style="margin: 0 0 0.9em 0; padding-top: 0;" data-datetime="2025-03-01T03:50:32Z">3-02</h3>
<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">Goku and the Spirit Bomb -

it was more or less inevitable this scene would one day get compared to a Liberal election
but there is a big problem with this metaphor

we have established that the purpose this technique serves stylistically within the ontology of the Dragon Ball universe is to cover the possibility of an army of people having numerical advantage over one person without taking away the conceit that it just happens to be that all important battles occur between individuals.
we have also touched on the concept that within the context of Dragon Ball many instances of violence are meant to be taken literally as violence. notably, when explaining the prior history behind Freeza and the Freeza Force it is shown that Saiyans are wary of being killed by Freeza, and this is a major reason they obey. Freeza controls the Saiyans not just because they are too afraid to take action or because they somehow consider him a proper representative for their populational ideology, but largely because they do not have the _physical capacity_ to stop Freeza from exerting his strength to control them. When Goku's allies fight Freeza and this fight drags on for a significant time, the obvious narrative purpose of such a thing would be to attempt to prove to the audience that Freeza was really so strong that nobody else could have previously hoped to defeat him. As the narrative gives mountains of indirect and yet rather unsubtle evidence that nobody could have overcome Freeza except for Goku, what it also necessarily proves in the process was that Freeza held the other Saiyans under his will through his actual material means of power. It was Freeza's power that meant that everyone had to obey Freeza, and it was Goku's power that meant everyone did not have to obey Freeza.

as far as the official, observed series of events in the Dragon Ball shows and manga is concerned, this is a great thing for the people of earth.
but it also conceals a terrifying possibility: if Goku did not have their best interests in mind, who could stop him? whether anybody is on his side or not, he has great power in the first place, and if he really wants to do the Spirit Bomb technique without caring about how powerful it is, he has the capacity to drain the life out of any number of the galaxy's non-person animals. were it possible for anybody to simply make him angry enough he feels like he needs to bring down the power of ten million frogs on them, he could. what if Raditz were still alive and he used the Spirit Bomb? what if Vegeta learned the Spirit Bomb? what if instead of Goku, some arbitrary Saiyan with a terrible worldview used the Spirit Bomb instead? unless they want to be reduced to vapor, anybody they threatened to point it at would more or less have to behave.

this is the great problem with the concept of democulture. when culture inherently exists at such a low level, nearly at the level of continuous Subject development itself, it becomes impossible to draw any hard boundaries around the application of democulture in the manner of the boundaries of a republic or the boundaries of an institution. battles to establish democulture from some group of people to another group of people easily ooze out of any particular institutional boundaries or quickly become so _small_ the boundaries become irrelevant, transforming into confrontations atop the relationships between specific people and turning personal. if democulture efforts didn't start out with any relation to Anarchist ideologies, the complete openness of structure and boundaries renders them anarchic. it quickly becomes that nothing actually regulates democulture. democulture quickly devolves into a sheer horizontal social interaction between individuals who possess a toxic relationship with each other, or such a relationship between increasingly large free-floating "individual" populations.

the problem with democulture is not a moral problem. to say that democulture is impossible to establish is not the same statement as saying that it would be _morally Wrong_ to establish democulture if it were possible; whether democulture is "oppressive" is a very separate question from whether it can be done. but the great problem with democulture is that it _appears to be impossible_. in practice, the concept of democulture seems to posit a structural level of society which simply does not exist. democulture would appear to posit that independent of any kind of concept of elected mayors or local soviets, there is some kind of officialized barrier around human towns and neighborhoods which makes them "officially" a countable Culture, as if perhaps there was an official Spanishness Office or an official Californianness Board where a few people determined absolutely every characteristic of being White and everyone else then had to accept it before ever getting to go to work or vote or anything else. if there really was such a thing, then it would not be difficult to make the argument that if a narrow board of shareholders can be replaced with a constellation of local soviets then surely the narrow and exclusive Spanishness Office could be replaced in a similar way. but the problem is that whole movements of people build up seeking to tear down the Californianness Board or the Spanishness Office only to suddenly find that there _is_ no Spanishness Office. the schizoanalyst theory of Rhizome and counterpart center-Liberal theories of getting people into elected offices as living Media Representation or building up a committed center-Liberal nation whether the Liberal parties promise any policies each have a similar goal of protecting culture and becoming able to control and order around wrong culture before it gets out of control. unfortunately neither of these groups of theories proves effective because culture actually emerges from countable populations, and countable populations emerge from the daily attempts of individuals to physically survive. when people find themselves menaced by wrong cultures, these are actually _countable_ wrong Cultures in the same sense as entire nations or tribal populations. in some senses, these countable reactionary Cultures behave vaguely like organisms, attempting to eat up whatever resources available to them before others get them, as well as making attempts to defend the overall existence of either all their individuals or the whole terrain occupied by their individuals. a literal population of animals in nature does not necessarily attempt to defend every one of its individuals at once in this way, dispatching for instance every pride of lions against every hyena (some instances such as flocks of sheep or birds may be a slight exception in that an entire flock may flee a situation at once), but for various reasons a population of reactionary humans also carries out this extra step. inasmuch as culture is uncountable, it never produces any central offending Spanishness Office to take down. inasmuch as culture is countable, it guts its larger containing body, attempts to create its own Free Will, and becomes uncontrollable.
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<h3 style="margin: 0 0 0.9em 0; padding-top: 0;" data-datetime="2025-03-02T00:42:30Z">3-02</h3>
<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">some time before World War II, the people of Japan were owning Koreans as slaves
after World War II, Japan and the United States teamed up to tell Korea exactly what it had to be according to /two/ majority populations of former slaveholders. Korea couldn't catch a break.
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{{BopFwd|Philosophical_Research:Molecular_Democracy/5.1r/2081 market-signals|v5.1 scraps/ we have one market signal and we all share it}}
{{BopFwd|Philosophical_Research:Molecular_Democracy/4.3r/3555 hatfields|v4.3 scraps/ analyzing horizontal attacks as small-scale warfare [unreleased]}}
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